Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and a data processing system for monitoring operating states of a technical plant. The term "technical plant" is understood to include fossil-fuel powered or nuclear power plants as well as manufacturing and production systems, for instance.
Monitoring systems in a power plant are intended to display the current operating states of the plant and to report any deviations from a proper operational state. One generally usable monitoring system has been heretofore known from German published, non-prosecuted patent application 38 12 618. A special troubleshooting apparatus which may be a component of a monitoring system is known from German published, non-prosecuted patent application 38 32 789.
Extensive acquisition of measured values for the operating states of all the plant parts is necessary for accomplishing the monitoring tasks. In a fossil-fuel gas and steam turbine power plant, these include components and auxiliary systems of the turbo sets, for instance. As their functional groups, these turbo sets include the gas or steam turbine and generators coupled to them via various shafts, and a steam generator or condenser. These plant parts may also be the components and auxiliary systems of the fuel/air supply, burner control, and cooling of the generators, for instance. Important components and auxiliary systems also include components and auxiliary systems of the gas or steam turbine. A signal or data exchange typically takes place via a bus system within a guide system common to the plant parts, with which guide system the plant operating states are controlled and monitored fully or partly automatically.
As the energy or work done by such plants is increasingly exploited, the demands for plant availability increase as well, and especially short down times for maintenance and repair are sought. In a combined gas and steam turbine plant, this means for monitoring the component and auxiliary systems of the generators and the turbines, alone, several thousand measured values must be evaluated discontinuously within more or less short time intervals. The attendant increase in complexity in the monitoring systems leads to increasing difficulties in manipulation by the human operators in a control room, both from the standpoint of a comprehensive overview of the current operating state of the plant and from that of early detection of defects and plant anomalies. For this purpose, European patent application EP 0 242 609 discloses a hierarchically arranged control system in which as the degree of automation increases, a pyramidally increasing densification of information in the data supplied by the detection of measured values is achieved. Neverthe- less, evaluating the measured values is left to the human operators, so that within a short time, for instance during especially critical operating states, high information densities must be handled by the operators.